I’ve always been fond of old things. Old shoes, long since trained to caress my feet. Old jeans that do the same for my expanding waist. Old coats. In student days a friend gave me his FCA coat and Mam dyed it navy blue. I ate, drank and slept in it for years. My heart fell apart with it. And I was very fond of my hardy mother, who lived to 92. No need here to explain the age-old special relationship between Irish mother and eldest son.
Once, writing for another newspaper, I vented furious at the outrageous suggestion that a journalist would sell his/her soul for a good story. As if! At the end of the article I added a note: “For sale. Older lady. Approaching sell-by date. Answers to the name ‘Granny’. Hardly drinks, smokes rarely, has the odd flutter on the horses, a shark at cards (25), good with kids, particularly teenagers. Reasonable offers invited.”
She could have killed me, so to speak. There were no offers. Something I reminded her of regularly.
As we approach the end of December I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for this old year. It brought the usual ups and downs in my own life, including deaths that remain a shock.
But after the elections in the US last month, delivering a clean sweep to Donald Trump and his band of deplorables, I wonder whether we will come – in the not-too-distant future – to look back on 2024 and the years preceding it as something of a golden age when we just didn’t know we had it so good.
The auguries are not good; for Palestinians; for Ukrainians; for our exports to the US; for democracy within the US. Yes, certainly, interesting times ahead.
[ In a Word … StableOpens in new window ]
It was the late, great George Bernard Shaw who described Ireland as “the largest open-air lunatic asylum in the world”. That is no longer the case. In those unhappy stakes we have long since been surpassed by our big neighbour to the west.
Even “the sea oh the sea, grá geall mó chroí”, long though it remains between America and “we”, is no guarantee of protection in these times from the madness 3,000 miles away.
So, we fall back on the sweetest four-letter word: hope. It springs eternal.
Old, from Old English ald, for “long in existence”.